The Can of Soup That Ruined My Life

[Adrian Schneider]

Yes, believe it or not, a can of soup can actually ruin one's life.

Being sick and all, I decided to cook some soup. Being a programmer and not a chef, I put the can of soup onto the stove (as per the directions) and turned that sucker up. Now, I'm not a complete idiot... I've cooked it like that before and it worked out OK. But somehow, lady luck wasn't on my side tonight.

I go back to my PC to kill a few minutes while I wait, and I hear a loud explosion.

I immediately panic, well knowing what had just happened. My roommate had a blank look in his face, wondering what the hell just happened. I rush to the kitchen to see the entire room covered in Campbell's chunky soup. When I say the whole room, I mean it - the ceiling, walls, doors, lights, appliances. It was completely covered with chunks of meat, veggies and sauce.

I mean, it's pretty damn funny... one of those worst case scenarios that you don't even think about. I pretty much peed myself, and begged for some help with the cleanup since we are both dead if it's not cleaned before it starts to stain.

Everything went pretty well except for the ceiling, which is white with that stacco? texture stuff on it. We had to rub it off in order to clean it, so we have a very uneven ceiling with patches of wood showing. We have about 15 minutes before my other roommate comes home, who is the fussy girl who likes things clean.

At some point in our cleaning process, one of the kitchen lights went out, so at this point my roommate starts taking it apart to look at it. It's one of those 4ft pole lights with the rectangular plastic cover. As we are trying to put it back in and get it working, it drops and shatters into a million pieces. Dust and broken glass is now covering our 3 hours of scrubbing.

Anyway, by some miracle she is late, and 4 hours later we managed to clean everything up, with the exception of the broken ("burned out") light and the patchy ceiling which we'll have to re-paint eventually.

What a night

All from one pesky can of soup, and an incompetent cook. I'm never cooking again.